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Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper “Yedioth Ahronoth” on Sunday that relations between Morocco and Israel were “already normal” before the normalization agreement announced Thursday by US President Donald Trump. .
“From our point of view, we are not talking about normalization because the relations were originally normal, we are talking about a resumption of relations between the two countries as before, because the relationship has always existed. “.
Declaration of sovereignty
On Thursday, outgoing United States President Donald Trump announced his country’s recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, the disputed former Spanish colony, and an agreement to normalize relations between Morocco and Israel, which it was also well received by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On Sunday, about a thousand people demonstrated in support of the Moroccan position on Western Sahara in front of the Parliament in the capital, Rabat.
Since Saturday, the United States adopted a new “official map” of Morocco that includes Western Sahara, whose sovereignty has been disputed for decades in Rabat and the Algerian-backed Polisario Front separatists.
Morocco, which established official relations with Israel in the late 1990s after the Oslo agreement between the Palestinians and Israelis, is the fourth Arab country this year to announce an agreement to normalize relations with the Hebrew state, after the United Arab Emirates. States, Bahrain and Sudan.
Morocco closed the liaison office in Tel Aviv in 2000, at the beginning of the second Palestinian intifada.
Distinguished relationships
In the interview, Bourita stated: “The relations between Israel and Morocco are distinctive and cannot be compared with the relationship between Israel and any other Arab country.”
He added: “Morocco has an important history with the Jewish community, a special history in the Arab world. The king … and previous kings, including Hassan II, used to respect and protect Jews. Relations between Morocco and Jews they were distinguished relationships that cannot be found in any other Arab country. ” .
While the Israeli political class and press welcomed the agreement between Morocco and Israel, which provides for the establishment of a direct air route between the two countries, the Palestinians condemned it.
The Palestinians consider the successive declarations of the Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel, in violation of the Arab consensus that had made the solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict a basis for concluding peace with the Hebrew state.
King Mohammed VI said Morocco will remain a supporter of the Palestinians, but on the streets of Gaza on Sunday, the Palestinians criticized the king.
“The Moroccan people are not satisfied with what the Moroccan leadership did to the Israelis,” Moamen Al-Harthani, a Gaza resident, told AFP.
“Normalization leads to the destruction of the Palestinian cause,” he added.
Mahmoud al-Zahr, an official of the Hamas movement, called on the Moroccan parliament to pass legislation “criminalizing normalization.”
A good model
For his part, the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said that the Palestinians need to “understand that today there is a new model,” explaining that the Arab model of not having relations with Israel has been put aside until resolve the conflict.
“The new model is to establish relations with the Islamic world and the Arab countries first, so that we can deal with the Palestinians,” he added.
The former ambassador indicated that future peace talks between the two parties could include the presence of delegates from other Arab countries.
US national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Sunday, reiterated Bourita’s view that normalization with Morocco is “special” given the number of Jews from Moroccan origin.
“Morocco will benefit from the support of the Moroccan Jewish community,” he added, also noting the number of “Israelis whose ancestry is linked through Morocco.”
Netanyahu said none of the normalization agreements “would have been possible” had it not been for the Trump administration.
